The Pearl and some scattered thoughts about reverb
Last month, Nashville got eight inches of snow, and as it seems to go with most southern cities, we lacked the equipment and planning to deal with it. The temperatures were well below freezing for nearly a week, the roads remained icy and horrible, and everyone who could just stayed at home. The world got quiet and slow, and I spent a lot of time with Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s The Pearl.
Released in 1984, The Pearl isn’t exactly a buried treasure—it’s about as well known as an ambient record can be, and if you like that sort of thing, you’ve probably heard it. But one of the most satisfying things about music is the way that we can listen to a recording we’ve heard dozens or hundreds of times before and still hear something new. Sometimes, that new thing can be the difference between enjoying a record and obsessing over it.
The EMT 250 Digital Reverb was released in 1976. It’s three feet tall and weighs close to a hundred pounds—huge by modern standards, but positively petite when compared to its analog forbears. It also kinda looks like a set piece from the Death Star’s interrogation room. The first commercial digital reverb unit, it was an immediate hit with producers and engineers, and quickly became a studio staple. And as is the case with a lot of studio gear from the seventies, it’s still sought-after because it has the kind of magic and character that isn’t easily replicated by more modern alternatives.
I’m writing about the EMT 250 because, of all the elements in play on this record—Harold Budd’s gorgeous piano figures, Eno’s synthesizers, the nature sounds, etc.—it’s the reverb that caught my attention and caused me to start listening on repeat. Reverb is a key element of pretty much every piece of music that could be described as “ambient.” If you are a dork like me and spend time on any sort of music production forum, you’ll inevitably come across a post where someone says something like “I want to make ambient music, where do I start?” to which some other user will reply “take any sound source and add a bunch of reverb and delay.” A bit reductive, maybe, but not altogether inaccurate—it’s really that important to the genre. So it’s not just that there’s a lot of reverb. The thing about The Pearl is the quality of the reverb.
The EMT 250 has been used on thousands of hit songs over the years, but Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois pushed it to its limit on The Pearl, and the results are spectacular. Harold Budd’s piano dissolves into lush, undulating waves, cold and warm at the same time. Something about it is unnatural; maybe it’s that we are hearing a relatively primitive digital emulation of an analog method that is itself an emulation of something that occurs on its own in the natural world. Sort of an uncanny-valley thing. For whatever reason, it doesn’t sound real. Not in the plastic, manufactured way of say, a late-aughts pop guitar track, but in a way that could make you question the nature of reality itself if you thought about it for too long. Sometimes, as on “Late October,” this is combined with the venerable Eventide Harmonizer to create an ascendant shimmering effect that sounds like the opening of heaven’s own gates, and the unreality is cranked up yet another notch.
(It is worth noting that U2’s The Unforgettable Fire—Christian rock musicianship’s ur-text—was also released in 1984, produced by Eno and Lanois, and employed similar techniques in its quieter moments. Thirty years later, every non-denominational evangelical church was issued a nineteen year-old guitarist with Justin Bieber hair, daddy’s money, and a Strymon Bluesky.)
Anyway, if I was writing about almost any other sort of music and I said “what this is really about, for me, is the reverb,” it would probably seem like I’d missed the point. But thankfully, this is the kind of music in which tonal and sonic quality are equal in importance to things like melody and harmony, and I can get away with it. In the liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Eno laid out a mission statement of sorts for the genre, that it should “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Many of the leading lights of today's ambient scene wouldn’t subscribe to this philosophy, but it applies to this particular record—you can let it fade into the background, or you can lose your mind over the fucking reverb.
One song I can’t get out of my head this week:
Nuyorican Soul and Roy Ayers: "Sweet Tears"
That's all for this now. If you liked this and want to forward it to a friend or two, that'd be pretty cool. See you next week!